As a digital marketer, it is important for you to learn the difference between Reach and Impressions. These are two important metrics of marketing and can help you build a strong online presence. These two buzzwords are being talked about everywhere but not many people understand their difference.
In this article, I’m going to dive deeper into the ‘Reach Vs Impressions’ debate and help you understand their common yet important differences. I’ll also go over how important they are for marketing a business.
Let’s start.
What is the Difference Between Reach and Impressions?
The term Reach indicates the total number of people who view your post. On the other hand, Impressions are the total number of times your post is displayed on a person’s feed. Let’s break it all down…
What is Reach?
As mentioned, Reach represents how many people view a post. In a utopian world, each and every follower will see anything you publish on a social media account. Unfortunately, that’s not how it all works.
Social media sites display specific kinds of content to specific users based on algorithms. So, only a small portion of followers see shared posts.
Assume you have 150 Instagram followers and a post has 100 ‘reach.’ This tells that 100 of your 150 followers saw a message. Remember that Reach isn’t just determined by the number of followers. Reach will be considered even if a post is viewed by non-followers.
You may also like to read about some Ways to Boost Your Social Media Likes Effectively.
What are Impressions?
Whenever a post is displayed on a person’s feed, it will be counted as an Impression even if the post was clicked or not. A main difference between Reach and Impressions is that one person can have multiple impressions for a piece of content.
In other words, if someone sees a post 4 times, the post will have 4 impressions. Let’s try to understand this with a similar hypothetical example I mentioned above.
You have 150 followers and a post gets 300 impressions. This tells that each person might have viewed the same post twice. It can happen in different ways. For example, you can view a celebrity’s picture on Facebook.
After that, a friend shares the same picture with you again. When you view it the second time, it will get two impressions from you. In general cases, the number of impressions is always higher than Reach.
Reach Vs Impressions on Different Social Media Platforms
I have discussed how different social media platforms measure and show reach Vs impressions below.
Instagram has general standards for measuring these metrics. It mentions “Accounts Reached” to tell how many unique accounts viewed a post.
On the other hand, it uses “Views” to explain how many times a piece of content was displayed on a person’s feed.
Users can view all of these details within the Instagram application. You can view the results of the past week, a month, or even three months. Users also have an option of breaking down the results by gender or location.
TikTok
TikTok has a slightly different way of representing the metrics. It refers to the number of people who viewed the post as the “Reached Audience”. On the other hand, TikTok uses “Total video views” to explain impressions.
Users can view these analytics in both personal and business accounts.
X (Twitter)
X, previously known as Twitter, tells the number of times a tweet appeared on a feed using the “Total Impressions” word. These analytics details can be found for 7 days, 28 days, or a specific month.
X doesn’t show the total Reach of tweets.
Facebook shows you details about reach and impressions in its Insights section. Here, Page reach defines how many people viewed it. Similarly, impressions tell about how many times a page was displayed on the feed.
Why Reach and Impressions are Important?
These metrics are important for different reasons. Here are their details:
Importance of Reach
It is important because:
- Reach gives you an overview of the size of your target audience. The more reach a post has, the more audience you have that can be potential customers.
- Focusing on reach can be useful while running paid campaigns. Reaching out to more people ensures the marketing budget is being well spent.
- It promotes brand awareness by reaching out to more people
Importance of Impressions
It is important because:
Impressions promotes engagement. If a person sees a post multiple times, he’s persuaded to engage with.
· It can help you get more clicks on your advertisements.
Reach Vs Impressions – Head-to-Head Comparison
| Reach | Impressions |
| It tells the total number of people who saw a post. | It tells how many times a post was displayed on people’s feeds. |
| You get 1 reach for 1 profile. | You can get multiple impressions from 1 profile. |
| It can go beyond the total followers. | It can also go beyond the total number of followers. |
| It can be measured on many social media platforms. | It can also be measured easily by most platforms. |
| It can be helpful when it comes to reaching out to more audiences. | It is useful for engagement purposes. |
Conclusion
Understanding a complete comparison between Reach vs Impressions is important for marketing purposes. Reach explains how many people view your business. Impressions, however, explain how many times they appear on newsfeeds.
Different social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram measure them differently. These metrics are essential for implementing a perfect marketing strategy. They can be of use for both appearing to more audiences and getting more engagements as well.
FAQs
Is Reach better than Impressions?
Both metrics are essential. Their importance is determined by your marketing goals.
Can I get multiple reach numbers from a single profile?
No. One profile cannot help you get multiple reach for a post.
Can I use third-party analytics tools to measure these metrics?
Yes. There are many tools that you can use to measure these metrics.
